I like the idea of including captive and non-established obs in “Research Grade” (or whatever the name may be) but hiding them from view by default. If that doesn’t distinguish wild and non-wild enough, maybe we can have an additional tag on the top of observations, beside the Research Grade tag, that can say “Captive/Cultivated” or “Escapee/Waif”?
I don’t see a reason for keeping them visible because regular identifying is necessary anyway to mark them as non-established. If a bunch of observations start coming through, I would think identifiers would be observant enough to notice a pattern? I do think my perspective on distinguishing escapees/new populations/vagrants is biased by living in a place with cold winters though. Several wild Brown Anole observations have been posted in Ontario, but there’s no question that they recently came from imported plants because there’s no way they’d survive the winters here and establish a population. That’s not the case in say, California.
Also, in the vast majority of cases bird vagrants are pretty easy to distinguish from escaped pet birds so I don’t see a reason for them to be involved.